The best of friends are glued together on the sofa, wrapped in a mélange of blankets, the blasting AC sprouting goosebumps on their exposed wrists as they pass a joint back and forth, the cold air decreasing their body temperatures, combatting the friction of the undercover exploration.

Ice spins around slowly in plastic cups of pinot grigio, box-poured. Around them, wasted partygoers are shuffling off to bedrooms, to nooks, to crannies, doors locked and clicked and fastened with bangles around the knobs to keep a separation between fact and refrigeration.

Muffled moans, the parting sighs of lips opening, tongues swirling together, the pitch of a pendulum somewhere in the apartment, swinging back and forth—slower and slower—as the two nestle somehow closer, the yellow haze overtaking them, fervent departure from friendship into something more. They melt together, lost to the desires boiling inside them.

A security camera on a rooftop just outside the window captures the entire scene. CCTV, a compressed ruby of truth, at last. The soft touches, the way each knows the other better than themself. The moment passes too quickly before they’ve realized what they’ve done, the film unrolling and spinning out of control, bursting through the window.

They pull away from one another and watch the black snake coil all around them, each frame capturing their unspoken feelings. Without warning, the drugs knock against their skulls like the kiss of a pistol and suddenly it’s all something more than a memory, less than a question posed by the team of divers assigned to recover the footage from the shipwreck, to replay it endlessly, searching for the answer: “What now?”

And like a lock forever locked or a jar forever jarred the best of friends find stillness, listening to the talking walls, a tantric sermon that lulls them to sleep. They dream as one, of vowels and consonants and homonyms, an alphabet soup spelled across the sky, the words “Is this love?” framed at the center, around a spiral of nonsense. And it is. Or it isn’t. Or it is and isn’t.

When the partygoers wake in the earl gray light, they steal the silverware from the drawers before clanging back toward the dark notches they inhabit. Each look back at the sleeping couple on the sofa and suddenly feel a deep sadness, an air of their own inconsequence, as if they have stumbled upon a poem written by the universe they were never intended to see.

The best of friends, too, will wake and wonder if they are now something more than all that. With no forks or knives of spoons, they are unable to eat helpings of memory from one another’s minds to help them understand. Instead, they smile at one another and begin to pick up the dregs of the party. Answers can wait.